Music, hopefully

I'm leaving Monday morning for Pittsburgh for the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop and have been sort of dreading the flight, and Jon suggested that perhaps music would be in order. I have a portable CD player that I've used from time to time to a fair amount of success, but, well, it's a portable CD player. This is, today, the height of lame; I think Walkmans are more chic. Also, two hours of battery life and carrying CDs around is obnoxious.

So that got me started thinking about portable MP3 players. However, being the sort of person that I am, all of my music is in Ogg Vorbis, not in MP3, and I really don't want to convert it. That immediately limits the field of MP3 players by quite a lot.

Today, after dithering about this for rather too long, I decided fine, I haven't spent that much money this year and I should really try this portable music thing that everyone else swears about. However, we completely struck out at Fry's in attempting to find something that would play Ogg Vorbis, other than a 128MB Flash player. I don't have a huge amount of music, but I've got more music than that, and know perfectly well that I'd get sick of only 128MB of music in the course of one plane flight, let alone two.

So off to Amazon, since they have this overnight shipping thing, right? And if I'm going to drop $300 on a player, adding $25 for the shipping really isn't that significant. Of course, Amazon didn't stock what I really wanted (the 20GB iRiver player), and finding clear compatibility information on-line for Debian and MP3 players is harder than one would think. (Finding Ogg Vorbis compatibility information is actually quite easy, thankfully.) And most of my other choices didn't offer overnight shipping.

To make a long story short, after lots of searching, hemming and hawing, and deleting my shopping cart, I just bought a mpio HD300. The documentation apparently sucks and in theory it requires a Windows (or Mac) program to generate its indices, but based on someone else's work, it looks like that's pretty easy to surmount. And not only is it pretty easy, but the player internally supports .m3u indices, which means that I can drop Madman-generated playlists on the thing. And, again if this information pans out, I can do the firmware upgrades from Linux. Sweet.

Amazon claims that it will not arrive until the 20th, which is too late. This is quite possibly the case, since the one-day shipping thing often does not consider Saturday a day. We will see. If it does not arrive, I will be out $25 and will get it when I get back. Oh well. If it does arrive, hopefully it will actually work. This will involve getting USB working on my bizarre system at home, or getting it working on my less bizarre but also less rebootable system at work, something that I've never done before because I'm not a portable gadget sort of person. Hopefully I will be travelling to Pittsburgh with music. Alternatively, I may be travelling to Pittsburgh with considerably less hair. We'll see.

Posted: 2005-06-16 21:52 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-07-22